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52 The PCB Design Magazine • October 2017
ery time it gets smoother, obviously,
signal loss improves substantially
and measurably, so we continue
to drive that down. We also
work with other suppliers who
have offerings that help miti-
gate the roughness in the cop-
per, which improves the loss
and it mitigates skew. We've
done a lot of research and we
do present it. We presented this
a number of times to IPC Design-
ers Councils and have been invited to
speak in front of many design groups
to help provide that information in
an effort to mitigate the problems they're going
have with their designs once they become real
time and real life.
Shaughnessy: Like the saying goes, if you don't
have signal integrity problems now, you will.
Berry: That's true. I saw that in print actually.
Because of that, we've become an asset to many
of our fabricators, where their sales and front-
end engineering groups are working with de-
signers, CMs, OEMs, and we've been invited
many, many times this year to travel with them
and present and support some of their offerings
to designers who have this skew or loss issue.
Shaughnessy: Now we see all these boutique
and hybrid materials coming out. I know mate-
rials like PTFE are hard for the fabricator to work
with, but they have really low loss.
Hunrath: PTFE has been a good ma-
terial for signal integrity, but me-
chanically it's not very good. It
comes with a lot of baggage. As
Norm mentioned, the trend to
go to smoother coppers has
its trade-offs too, because the
adhesion is not the same. Our
customers need to understand
that. If there's a work-around or
a way of making a mixed-materi-
al package to get what they need,
but still also have the board manu-
facturable and have it built for as-
sembly without any problems, you
need to put all that together.
Shaughnessy: So, where do you
think are some of the big op-
portunities in the future for In-
sulectro?
Hunrath: Well, certainly the
higher-performing materi-
als from Isola and DuPont are a
growing part of our business. We've
been working hard to make sure our
customers have access to a quick ac-
cess. We do a lot of same-day deliver-
ies for those materials, but that's a growing part
of our business. We're putting a lot more variety
in our inventory, so we can get these materials
out there.
Shaughnessy: Designers and signal integrity
engineers sometimes complain that materials
companies release these new materials without
fully testing and characterizing them. But still,
it can take companies 18 months to get one ma-
terial set ready and out the door.
Berry: Well, when you consider the require-
ments of a laminate set, first of all, it has to
be thermally robust. It has to be able to be as-
sembled in a lead-free environment. In addition
to that, it has to be manufacturable. The board
shop has got to be able to laminate it, drill it,
clean the holes out, and do it cost-effectively. It
all boils down to the cost of ownership, so that
you have something that is manufactur-
able, that the board shop can use. One
of the points you called out was
hybrid construction. On some of
these more expensive low-Dk,
low-Df products, they're very
expensive, so wherever possi-
ble people are putting in lower
cost FR4 for the power planes,
so that they can reduce the cost.
Now you have a hybrid. You've
got to make sure that those are all
compatible with each other. Isola
has spent an extraordinary amount
of time working to make sure that
Chris Hunrath
Norm Berry
INSULECTRO TEAMS WITH ISOLA TO ADDRESS SIGNAL INTEGRITY NEEDS